A primate blueprint

In taking over the rebooted Rise of the Planet of the Apes franchise from Rupert Wyatt, director Matt Reeves performs the same function as when he remade the Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In. He rehashes the things that worked about the original, while simultaneously reducing the characters to one-note drones, and redrawing all of the shadings into big, fat, broad strokes. It’s a technically adroit but flavorless film, and it trashes the surprising narrative structure of its predecessor in favor of this more factory-tested, post-apocalyptic gloom. All the world-building of Wyatt’s film has resulted in a world that is pretty boring and familiar.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes opens 10 years after the end of 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which saw the scientifically enhanced superchimp Caesar lead his superpissed ape brethren into the freedom of Muir Woods. In the decade since, most of humanity has been wiped out by a deadly virus, with only a small band of survivors left in the ruins of San Francisco. Meanwhile, the apes have formed a thriving society, and Caesar and a few other apes have even developed a Mr. Miyagi-like ability to speak English sans indefinite articles.

Dawn’s tension comes from the conflict between these two societies in flux—the dwindling humans need access to a dam in order to power the city, but the abused apes still hold a grudge. Caesar is now a father, and while wary of the encroaching humans, he searches for a collaborative road to peace. However, his second-in-command Koba is more deeply wounded and fiercely militant (and the ugliest and therefore the most evil), so he attempts to artificially instigate a conflict with the humans.

Naturally, the group of sympathetic humans led by Jason Clarke and Keri Russell (Gary Oldman overenunciates another American accent as the less sympathetic human leader) idiotically aids Koba’s fiendish plan by dragging the same trigger-happy, spiteful, ape-hating loudmouth along on every expedition into the primate village. Whatever the plot hole, it finally leads to the rampaging ape battle scenes that are the main reason this film exists.

As advertised, the motion-captured monkey effects are next-generation stuff, a leap forward from the leap forward of Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and the various CGI primates have a tactile presence that is legitimately jaw-dropping and borderline disturbing. Too bad the megapixels are the only things that matter here, and however photo-realistic the monkey fur, a cardboard character is still a cardboard character. Common decency will not allow me to completely dismiss a film in which a viscerally realistic primate rides a horse down California Avenue with machine guns blasting in both paws, but I never really cared who the ape was blasting or why.

Andy Serkis returns to provide the voice and motion-captured movements of Caesar, and for all the limitations of the screenplay, it’s a fully realized performance. Of course, the hundreds of computer artists who worked tens of thousands of hours to digitally create Caesar deserve their share of the credit, especially since every primate in the cast is brought to such similarly vivid life.

The human performances are another issue—few will lament the absence of James Franco’s bland, waxy turn from Rise, but at least his character was written with moral conflicts. Both the human and ape characters in Dawn have no deeper motivations than you would find in your average Hollywood revenge movie: They’re all just trying to protect their families—until someone pushes them too far! As the human lead, Clarke is given a character written for pure expedience, and so he is forced to tread a gray middle ground.

Finally, if you thought Freida Pinto’s token female scientist-who-cares from Rise was an afterthought, get a load of Russell’s token female scientist-who-cares. She exists solely to underline a single plot point—the surviving humans are immune to monkey flu —and to act motherly and look concerned. Ape society is no more progressive—its token female is Caesar’s ailing wife, who lies bedridden for 90 percent of the film, before rallying in time to act motherly and look concerned. The only difference is that the ape actually sells it.